What’s Going On In This Spooky Photo?

corey says…We’re working on our Gardens of Ireland podcast and couldn’t resist showing you this eerie photo from Woodstock Gardens in County Kilkenny. Do you have any ideas on what is going on? Does it freak you out?

And NO, we didn’t doctor up the photo, this is how it appeared when it came out of the camera. The only thing we did was brighten the image so it was easier to see.

Here are our journal notes from that day…

“The drive from New Ross to Inistoige is really beautiful with great views of the Nore Valley. Arriving in Inistoige over the old, stone bridge is great as well. It’s quite obvious why this village has been selected as a location for several films. It is so charming. We got a room at the Woodstock Arms B&B. It was a converted hotel, and although everything was modernized, it still had those elements of an old hotel. It was nothing fancy, but it certainly was nice enough for us.

We decided to forgo dinner and grabbed an ice cream and walked to Woodstock Gardens. The walk from town is long but great. We wandered the impressive gardens and paths and really had a great time. It was amazing to think about how the estates former residents used to live…especially since their tenants lived on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Liam insisted I take his photo in front of a California redwood. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the camera to take a clear shot. When I finally did…there was a very weird image in the photo. A ghost? Who knows…all I know is that I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

By the time we returned to town it was dark. People were sitting outside the pubs and restaurants and it was really quite enchanting. We walked around the square and along the river and then headed in to bed.

It was quite warm this evening, so we left our window open. We could hear a very drunk girl outside. She kept saying, “Get the feck off me.” We looked out the window to see if she was in trouble and found that a dog was quite fond of her leg. The poor girl kept yelling and hitting the dog, but he wouldn’t back down. She finally punched him and he left her alone.”

It’s not just a hand. It’s a faint image of a person standing on the ground and leaning on the tree. If you blow up the picture to 400% and focus on that section you will see the outline of the person. Seems like a dark haired person with a dark top and light colored shorts.

Bill, as you noted, I think it had something to do with the camera putting down some kind of double image rather than something supernatural. Images were coming out very blurry the whole time I was at Woodstock Gardens…never had problems before or after that though.

I just kept deleting the blurry ones, so I don’t have them to compare to see if something similar was causing the problems… like, some kind of double-exposure or low-light issues going on. This one looked like it was fine in the viewfinder, so it’s one of only a few that I have from that visit.

There seems to be accompanying “light leakages” (I hesitate to use the term “ghosting” for obvious reasons) in the upper left corner and at the base of the tree between the “hands” and Liam. The one at the base of the tree is definitely rectangular, so I’m leaning toward camera malfunction (didn’t know digital cameras had light leakages, though). The shape of the hands seem to closely match Liam’s, but if it is indeed a double image, it’s amazing how the fingers are perfectly placed into the contours of the bark, almost like they were kneading the tree. Has Liam been known to “knead” trees in the past? lol